Choosing the right way to get dashboard JSON into Grafana
Estimated time: 1 min
Deploy your dashboards
You have dashboard JSON from the Foundation SDK. Next you need that JSON to show up as a live dashboard in Grafana. Grafana supports several ways to do that. The right choice depends on the workflow your team already uses.
Ways to get JSON into Grafana
Method
How it works
Use it for
Considerations
Git Sync
Store dashboard JSON in a Git repository; Grafana keeps that path synchronized with your instance
Git-native teams that want the repo as the source of truth
You configure sync and auth in Grafana; changes follow Git and sync settings
Terraform
Define dashboards with the Grafana Terraform provider and run plan/apply
Teams that already manage infrastructure with Terraform
Another tool and state workflow if you don’t already use it
Grafana API
Send HTTP requests to Grafana yourself; other methods build on this
Full custom control in your own scripts
More code to write and maintain
This journey covers Git Sync. You’ll commit SDK-generated JSON to Git and let Grafana synchronize it. To deploy that same SDK JSON with Terraform instead, take the Terraform version of this journey.